Katarzyna Borowiec

Bio

Dr. Katarzyna (Kate) Borowiec is a R&D Associate Staff Member – System and Data Analytics Engineer in the Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She received her PhD (2021) and MS (2017) in Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has extensive experience with thermal-hydraulics modeling of the nuclear reactor systems. She was involved in many projects in the area of validation and verification, uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis, advancing development of statistical methods for nuclear reactor safety applications. Her research takes advantage of reduced order modeling, data analysis, machine learning and aims at combining data-driven approaches with physics-based modeling.  Her research interests include software development, high-performance computing, computational fluid dynamics, machine learning and data-driven modeling approaches.

In her current position, Katarzyna is supporting Involute Reactor CFD Group working in modeling of the HFIR reactor with COMSOL Multiphysics software. She is involved in the development of Fusion Energy Reactor Models Integrator (FERMI) and Advanced Tokamak Modeling Environment (AToM). She utilizes her skills in artificial intelligence and machine learning in Decision and Control of Complex Systems project and develops new data-driven models for MHD flows as a part of VERTEX project. 

Education

• PH.D. in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2018-2021)
  • Concentration: Computational Science and Engineering
  • Minor: Statistics 
• M.S. in in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2016-2017)
• B.SC. in Physics, University of Warsaw (2013-2016)
• B.SC.ENG in Power Engineering, Warsaw University of Technology (2012-2016)

Technical skills

• Experienced in various thermal-hydraulics codes used in nuclear industry including system codes (TRACE, RELAP5, RELAP5-3D) and subchannel codes (CTF)
• Expert in uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis methods in the nuclear reactor safety applications
• Experienced in machine learning and statistical analysis methods
• Computational skills
  - TH codes: TRACE, RELAP5, CTF, ANSYS Fluent, COMSOL Multiphysics
  - Neutronics Codes: SCALE, SERPENT, MCNP
  - Programming: JavaScript, R, Python, Matlab, VBA, C, C++, Fortran, Modelica, OpenMP, MPI
  - Other: Cluster computing, LaTeX, Git, Mathematica, LAMMPS, Bash, TokDesigner, IPS/FASTRAN

Publications